Mirror in the Aether

VIII

More tea and it's time to clear my head. I think that too much sitting around in front of a screen is doing me no good. It's looking into me. This tea is both bitter and tasteless. I swear it's getting worse. What I'd give for a whisky. The burn in the gullet. The dulling pull of blocked feeling. Shutting down receptors that tell me to care. I used to knock it back in late youth before I'd savour it in early maturity. A slow sip meant a steady buzz and I could hone in on the task at hand. Such visceral pursuits are only ever singular. It's easy when you don't try but when you dedicate yourself to the resistance of something your weaknesses seek you out.

I feel old and tired and I could laugh because age and rest and feelings have no meaning out here and in here. What a revelation. I miss being able to move. I mean really move. Track and field. Cardio. Bodily limitation. I'm a walking corpse and I want to be a running soul. Physical beings should not be bound in cages of any making.

Now that the lecture blocks are done with I have thirty minutes on the treadmill. Not to run or sprint, but to walk. The one activity to both clear and stimulate thought. Truly a crisis of being. My feet look like an aberration from this distance, and I picture them jutting out from the sheets as I lay on the sleeping plank. The curvature of my arches suggest exaggeration, almost seductive. I can see the veins and ligaments and the strands of hair. A world away from the present of my eyes. 

I think this can is rotting me. I feel like I'm withering. Gnarled and decomposed. Disintegrating and exchanging a triad of states for the purest state of all. Solid, air, and liquid steadily parting to dissolve into atoms. From humours and atoms to refined data and all the while we're in thrall. The true nothing.

She's sitting next to me as I savour the malt. She has that deep silk dress on. It clings to the curve of her hip and exaggerates the fullness of her thighs. She's wearing delicate pumps that arrange her feet as if they are in a true state of poise and balance. Her back is firm and languorous and I suspect she knows damn well the stir that pulses with each subtle shift of weight.

I can't picture her face after all these years but I can still conjure that scent. Deep and sweet and with a whispered zest. Hanging in the air between the wood smoke of the glass. I wish that I could switch the mask or even discard it, but there's nothing to her under the surface. I kept that moment for perpetuity because it was all there was and it was all there could be. I savour it still and I think I would even I wasn't on a treadmill in this can out here in the void.

And then later when I was in my apartment I stumbled through between rooms in the middle of the night and I stepped through an empty high ball glass which had been left on its side on the floor. It shattered and dug deeply into my foot. There was so much blood. There's something about that which stays with me. It's so vivid even now. It's not the shock or the pain or the letting. Its the poignancy of glass and blood. The reflection and the carrier. The role and the void and the great screen. The image through and beyond and the image back and within. It's poignant or poetic. I feel a deep ache and I wonder if it's the angel I've read about. 

Jocelyn the wretched failure is a hero in my eyes. Because I'm the judge out here and in here. I set both the nadir and the apex. They can't get to me when the shutter is down and the screen is a barrier rather than a window. I still have my self. I don't want to die, though. Not ever.

I don't believe in the purity of numbers. I don't believe in the certainty of sequence. The brain looks for patterns. That's literally how it makes sense. That is the very fibre of logic. A number is only an arbitrary symbol. The idea of numbers is a constructed myth. There are only pure states of being or non-existence. The purity of the diad. I don't believe the lie of formulae. I won't accept the ubiquity of illusion. I don't make my bed and call it destiny. I don't arrange my tools and suggest a divine message. I can see out to space right now and I know the answers to the great questions. The root of human nature is beneath the primal impulse and it is merely the innate need to order. Humanity is the straight line.

Men are weak and women are dishonest. There is no greater weakness than the father who pretends and there is no greater dishonesty than the mother who protests. What is the point? My answer has changed so much it's gone full circle. The marking of age is surely coming back around. When it's the same but different. 

You were right the first time you just didn't know all the ways that was so. Then the third time you see just how badly you strayed the second time. I'm not sure why I'm even out here. Why even keep me here? I'd be better out there. Just a matter of atoms in timeless space. Let my steps continue and I'll walk through a parting in the wall of the ship and the cold vastness can embrace me and my body will burst and my lungs will freeze and I will answer the great question of life in the Enochian tongue. Even if there was a recipient to hear it they couldn't, because there's no sound in space. 

I don't  think this is a particularly valuable exercise.